Keliy Anderson-Staley: Found Unfound

The first time I met my biological father was 2014, the same year I became a mother. Until the age of twelve, I didn’t know that my father, Tom, who had been raising us in an off-grid cabin in Maine, was not my “real” father. More shocking was that he had always known, but chose to raise me as his daughter. My mother gave me a single blurry photograph of my biological father—the only one she had—but I lost it a few years later. This lost photograph, and the significance it attained in its absence, became the inspiration for Found Unfound.

Over the past year, I’ve photographed both of my fathers, hoping to understand them, my childhood, and the role photography has played in my perception of family. The centerpiece of Found Unfound, is a set of tintype portraits of both men, presented as an intermixed grid. The men look uncannily similar and often difficult to tell apart. The portraits vary in their clarity and what they reveal; none can serve as a definitive portrait of the man.

A series of abstract collodion tintypes echo the chemical aberrations of the portraits. Made with chemistry in the darkroom, these pieces represent a hypothetical album and are each titled with the date and time they were made—a kind of journal of emotional states. Capturing the latent potential of the same process I use to make portraits, these abstract images are also a meditation on birth, becoming and the cycle of generations. The installation here is completed by a portrait of my mother, hung alone and only once alongside a portrait of my pregnant body. This project is an examination of time, the faultiness of memory and the difficulties of constructing family history from photographs. Found Unfound reflects the fundamental paradox of any photograph—that it can reveal a great deal and nothing at all, simultaneously.

KELIY ANDERSON-STALEY DEBUTS NEW WORK ABOUT HER FATHERS

We will also debut new work by Keliy Anderson-Staley about the discovery of her biological father, in Found Unfound. Over the past year, Keliy has photographed both of her fathers in an effort to understand them, her childhood, and the role photography has played in her perception of family. Presented as an intertwined grid, these tintype portraits reflect the fundamental paradox of any photograph—that it can reveal a great deal and nothing at all, simultaneously.

There will be an opening reception with all of the artists on Friday, July 10, from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Digital files from Found Unfound are available upon request

Keliy Anderson-Staley was raised off the grid in Maine, studied photography in New York City and currently lives and teaches photography at the University of Houston in Texas. She earned a BA from Hampshire College in Massachusetts and an MFA in photography from Hunter College in New York.

Anderson-Staley’s tintype portrait work was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Puffin Grant. She participated in the Bronx Museum AIM residency program in 2007, the Light Work residency and fellowship in 2010, and the Bakery Photo Collective in Westbrook Maine in 2012. She received a grant in Summer 2011 to prepare a solo exhibition of her series of tintype portraits [hyphen] Americans at Light Work in Syracuse, NY. Her color series about back-to-the-landers in Maine, Off the Grid, was one of five runners-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize (2009). Off the Grid received the grand prize at the Joyce Elaine Grant exhibition in Denton, TX in 2009 and the Arthur Griffin Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2010. The project was also a finalist for the Duke Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in 2008. She also recently received funding for her project, Imagined Family Heirlooms via Kickstarter, a crowd-funding website in 2011.

Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, Akron Art Museum, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art (Maine), and Museum of Fine Arts-Houston. She was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Puffin Grant, a fellowship from the Howard Foundation and the Carol Crow Fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography. Her work published in a solo issue of Light Work’s Contact Sheet and has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, Portland Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, Southeast Museum of Photography and the California Museum of Photography, as well as at a number of galleries around the country.

Anderson-Staley has been making wet plate collodion tintypes and ambrotypes for ten years. Her fine art and editorial work has appeared in a number of magazines, including Photo District News, New York Magazine, Art and Auction, Hemispheres Magazine, Camerawork, Contact Sheet, Conde Nast Traveler and Esquire Russia. Online, her work has been featured on Flak Photo, Conscientious, Fraction Magazine, PetaPixel, Ahorn Magazine and Daylight Magazine. Her series of tintype portraits was published in 2014 under the title On A Wet Bough by Waltz Books.

Bill, Tom: Father, Dad: All images are 10 x 8” one of a kind wet plate collodion on blackened aluminum for $2600 each (Sold in pairs only).

Album: All images are 14 x 14” one of a kind wet plate collodion on blackened aluminum for $2800 each.

Please call: (312) 266-2350 for prices of specific pieces.
Prices are print only unless otherwise indicated.

Keliy Anderson-Staley: Found Unfound July 10 — August 29, 2015